Here
we are..."Are You Ready For Some Football!" is right around the corner.
One of the biggest phenomenons in recent years is the explosion of
Fantasy Football Franchises. It is a huge industry and one of the
biggest social pastimes we are involved in every fall. Are you a Player?
and do you spend hours trying to research the perfect team. Would you
join a league and feel good about letting the computer auto pick your
franchise?
How about picking the perfect women or man? Often people describe
their perfect soulmate and have very specific criteria they are holding
out for.
In business more often then not, the plan is to unlock the door and
hope that someone walks through it. Little thought is given into
selecting that ideal customer. And when you don't take the time to put
out the feelers for that perfect customer, what walks through that door
is sometimes a disappointment.
Attracting your Model Customer
How do you attract the ideal prospective client? First you must
analyze yourself. No need to say you want your soulmate to be a world
class athlete when you are a couch potato. How do you analyze yourself?
One of the most used tools would be the SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for
Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. You should do a SWOT
on your firm, your employees, your marketplace, your competition and
your suppliers. Can all of these aspects support your search for the
perfect client?
Once you do this the next step is to begin to develop your mission
vision and values. Again do these support the ideal prospect? With this
higher view you move into your business plan and as part of that plan
you define your ideal customer and then what are you going to do to be
an attractive match to this prospective customer.
Example of how to Identify your customer
We went through this exercise and as a result we have identified our
ideal client. The first thing we did was looked at our current client
base and used qualities from the clients that fit with us best. Our
insurance agency's ideal clients would be described as:
- Commercial Lines Client – Small (not tiny) to medium sized
businesses who also understand the value of insurance and seeks a
trusted business advisor. We will be a generalist but continue to
develop specialty niches we feel we are positioned to competitively
service.
- Personal Lines Client – Client that has multiple exposures, owns
property and understands the value of insurance, who seeks to have a
relationship with a trusted advisor.
Once you have identified what your ideal client looks like, you have a
clear picture of who you want to go after and what type of business you
will want to turn down. This will also allow you to fine tune your
efforts and determine how you can bring the most value to your clients.
Bringing Value to your Customer
The value you present is what will set you apart in the eyes of your
client. Likely there are thousands of other options your client has to
buy what they need. Why should they buy from you?
After identifying our ideal customer we went on to our mission,
vision and value to define how we would establish value with our clients
and prospective clients. As insurance advisers we saw it as our mission
to add value by doing these three things:
- Teaching - Use our agencies wealth of knowledge and unmatched
portfolio of value added services to help them understand better their
exposure to loss and the alternatives to treat these exposures.
- Challenging - Not just offering status quo solutions that move the focus to price. Help them see exposure they might not see.
- Offering Value Added Services - Go above and beyond insurance by
offering complimentary services that other agents do not offer. We match
our clients and prospective client’s needs with our unique solutions.
Not only does this align with our agency values, but it is also how
we set ourselves apart to bring value to our clients. Now that we have
this laid out it is easier to create a marketing plan to find and sell
to our ideal customers.
The End Result
What has been the outcome of our taking the time to identify the
ideal client? It has helped us develop new strategies in our marketing,
especially our blogging content. I also has opened our eyes to our
existing client base to identify clients that don't really fit our ideal
definition and we are not servicing them and in many cases they are not
profitable to continue servicing.
One of the major problems we hear from other agents is that they are
getting leads that they don't care for and are servicing a lot of
clients that are not profitable. Essentially you are just wasting your
time, losing money and creating a giant headache for yourself.
It really is hard to build a business and even more difficult when
you develop relationships that are not optimized for the client or your
firm. Map out that ideal customer and discover how your business can add
value.